One of the reasons why there's so many like hot takes on either side, everybody is defining success differently.

If you're watching this, you'd likely have an opinion on the state of white tails here in 2026.

Is this the golden age? Or as white tail hunting as we know, it's slipping away through our fingers.

The deer are doing our right. It's really the people that are creating this controversy because we have a lot of different types of people that have different types of hunting styles with different views on what this thing should look like.

This week on the White Tail podcast presented by Moultrie, we're sitting down with Mark Kenyon, the director of conservation for meat eater to discuss white tail huntings, access issues, and what really happens if hunter numbers do decline?

Whether it be at the community level, at the state level, at the national forest planning level,

at the United States level, if you don't have some kind of representation, if we let hunter numbers fall away

because we selfishly just want more of the stuff for ourselves, we will be on on the menu 50% of the people listening to me say that right now are rolling their eyes real quick if you want to submit your question to the iowa dear class of we're doing seminars with lee lakoski and skips lie saturday and sunday you can click the link below and submit your questions and i hope to see at the show and you are, you're going to have an opportunity to ask your question in person.

And if you're not able to make it, those will be on YouTube and obviously here on the podcast. So let's go ahead and get right into this week's show. Here we go. All right, Mark, welcome to the Whitetail podcast. How you doing today? I'm great. I always appreciate the invite Jake. glad to be here chatting uh it's it's fun because you and I now work together on things too. So it's fun to be like on the opposite. I'm just like I'm here for fun now. I'm not working. I'm not doing anything. I'm just, I'm just here. You've got all the hard work in front of you. Yeah. Well, I'm going to do my best. I'm going to do my best. And this is a

different change of pace from where you were a week ago. Where were you a week ago? And what were you doing?

I was in the backcountry of Wyoming last week working on a film. And the super short Cliff Notes version

of what the film's about is exploring the sticky, controversial, polarizing topic of wolves in America and trying to explore that topic in a way in which we consider the many different takes on wolves

from all different perspectives and try to get down to what the actual reality is.

So let's not judge the book by the cover, either the cover where wolves are the worst or the cover where wolves are the best. And let's try to see what's actually on the pages inside of that book. And so we got

to over the course of two different trips, one in October and one now in February, talked to a number

of different people that kind of come to this from all those different perspectives, went to see some

really interesting different things like wolf den sites, different like ecological studies sites.

I went and talked to hunters and outfitters and ranchers and I went and talked to like researchers

and studiers and I watched wolf watching tourists. I went on a wolf hunt last year. And then this most

recent trip, we spent a week in the back country in like negative 10 snowy, blizzardy conditions,

just trying to actually get up close and watch wolves in real life on their turf, on their

terms to kind of get down to the ultimate bare

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